Between Imagination and Experience: a review + writing prompt of Sara Borjas’s Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff
by José Angel Araguz
In my own life as a Latinx writer, editor, professor and citizen, I have had to forge my own ideas of imagination and how it relates to experience. The micro and macroaggressions experienced in the circles of daily life—from out in public, academia, and the publishing world itself—have me and other BIPOC having to push against the erasure of our lived experience with fact and labor. This space of negotiating existence and presence came to me upon first reading the opening line of Sara Borjas’s Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff : “I cannot explain.” These three words come right under the title “Aztlán,” the name of the mythical homeland of the Aztecs and a charged word within Latinx, specifically Chicanx, experience. The role of this title word in Chicanx culture comes with associations of reclaiming and re-imagining. In this poem, Borjas shows how this re-imagining can transmute reality:
I cannot explain
this luxurious farm
of losers, or these girls
who drink Two Buck
Chuck all night. How our
cups are always full
of crimson, or why
I mistake water for wine.
This patch of women's
bodies rattle the ash trees.
Each ripple moves
the plot like a chapter
in a disappearing book.
A red barnyard door
builds another red
barnyard door.
A pot of menudo
simmers inside
another pot of menudo.
Here, what can’t be explained is given presence instead. Through listing what cannot be explained, the speaker creates a space somewhere between imagination and experience. What is possible in this space can be seen in the line “This patch of women’s / bodies rattle the ash trees.” The imagery here, one of presence affecting nature, is visceral and redefines the idea of homeland as living presence. This line also shows how imagination and experience blur and evoke each other, a move that is echoed in the later lines about a “red barnyard door” and a “pot of menudo” that spiral into repetitions of each other. As the poem moves forward word by word, language consistently moves away from explanation and more into evoked and (re)imagined experience.
My use of the words imagination and experience here are purposeful in that through them I’m making a connection to a Latinx poetic tradition where poets, when at the task of writing what something was like, often and necessarily engage with what it feels or seems like. These lines evoke, celebrate, and critique the idea of homeland through metaphor as well as by showing what it’s made of. The mention of mistaking “water for wine,” for example, carries biblical connotations; that this wine is “Two Buck / Chuck” brings with it a representation of class. Homeland, in a way, becomes what we make of the space between imagination and experience.
This idea can be seen again in “My Father Imagines Winning the Lotto,” a poem where the speaker’s father is described as:
Sixty-three & he's never been outside the state.
He watches The Weather Channel daily so he can speak
about the world. An all-inclusive universe sparks each time
my father imagines imagining a vacation.
This depiction plays out within another space between imagination and experience. By sharing how the “father imagines imagining a vacation,” the speaker presents the nuance with which she herself imagines the father negotiates presence within his own mind—that each time the father imagines “[an] all-inclusive universe sparks” it is implied that the world he lives in isn’t “all-inclusive.” This phrasing has us and the speaker interrogating the other meanings of this casual phrase used in gameshows where common prizes are “all-inclusive vacations.” This phrase is put to use in two ways: the first, in the father’s imagining of it being a family vacation that includes everyone; the second, in the implication that “[an] all-inclusive universe” must be imagined because it does not exist. This second implication is further explored:
Truth is, we will never be white.
We will always be afraid. It is not meant for us,
our worth provable across time and space, our greed met
in that for-family television manner. Never forget
where you come from, my father told me as a little girl,
The speaker’s hard truth here grows from the imagining of the father, which, again, is her imagining—a dual speculation which is cut short by the family’s stark experiences with reality. When the speaker remembers her father speaking the words “Never forget / where you come from,” the reader is presented with a more balanced portrait of both father and speaker, both able to imagine while knowing better. Yet, in the space between imagining and knowing, there is the push to remember and be present in where they “come from.” For the speaker, this phrasing is ever more poignant, because the place they “come from” is both a physical one and one created and informed by imagination and experience.
Heart is full of such informed spaces. In “Imagining My Brother’s Return,” the imagination is a space for sorrow and empathy, the speaker reminiscing over memories shared with her brother who has returned from a military tour. These memories are listed as the speaker furtively follows a brother down a hall, hoping to hear him in the present as she remembers him in memory, yet only to end up hearing “the buzz of the bathroom fan, / his sobbing against it.” Here, memory’s reimagining is thwarted by immediate experience. In “I See My Rapist’s Daughter” and “The Island of Raped Women,” trauma and sexual violence are interrogated in different ways: the former poem creates a complex space where imagination shakes identity, while the latter takes on an impersonal and fabulist tone within a prose poem. Here, imagination digs out the real experience of survivors that lies disguised under the language and expectations of heteronormative society.
Yet, however informed the poetic experiences in this collection are, there is never the air of the classroom, only the pulse of a poet working something out. Even a poem like “We Are Too Big for this House,” whose conceptual ambitions are matched by formal ones in the way it lives on the page in columns of prose paragraphs broken up by quotes and accompanied by paragraphs in the margin—even here, the work moves in a way that, again, wrestles with what it “cannot explain”—and, in fact, the work chooses not to explain, instead evoking experience through whatever means required.
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Writing Prompt: Venn Diagram Approach / Between Imagination and Experience
First, draw a Venn diagram on a piece of paper. Then, in one circle create a list of words, names, and phrases that you associate with imagination. Then in the other circle, create a list of words, names, and phrases you associate with experience. For both these lists, feel free to be as personal or impersonal as you like; the range can be from memory to the scholarly. When finished, contemplate the overlapping blank space in between. What poem exists between these two lists of words? Write it!
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear, Small Fires, Until We Are Level Again, and, most recently, An Empty Pot’s Darkness. His poems, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, New South, Poetry International, and The Bind. Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and composes erasure poems on the Instagram account @poetryamano. A member of the Board of Governors for CavanKerry Press, he is also a faculty member in Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA program. With an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, José is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander Magazine.